“If the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,” Musk told the Journal. He added: “This is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.”

Musk apparently didn’t explain what exactly he meant that the probability was on his side – he didn’t clarify whether he was talking about the likelihood that Tesla would go private, whether it actually had the funding to do so, or whether it could be done at the $420 a share price he stated. In a statement a week after his tweet, Musk explained that he had a conversation at the end of July with the managing director of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund that led him to believe that he had the support and financial backing of the fund to take Tesla private.

Musk’s tweet is the subject of an inquiry by regulators

Regulators will also likely look into Musk’s motivations for the tweet: Specifically whether he was trying to force a squeeze on short sellers.

Short sellers are investors who bet that a company’s stock will fall. Typically, they borrow shares from other investors and sell them at what they see as an inflated price with the plan to repurchase and return the shares when the stock falls. A squeeze can happen when stock prices rise far above the point at which short investors sold their shares, and they feel forced to repurchase them to cut their losses – or at the instigation of the underlying owners of the shares.